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Geocaching Ireland

When I established the forums in 2005 it was to offer a more richer web experience and greater functionality than the platform where we started this social adventure in 2003, Yahoo Groups. The forums were once a busy hive of activity and provided locals and visitors with a wealth of information just like the Geocaching Ireland Discussion Group on Facebook today.

It was a time where we didn't have the many social media platforms we have today, and it was a different time in terms of mobility and technology. There was no instant access to information, no Google Maps and a very limited base map on your GPSr. Mobile connectivity for me was a 9600bps Infrared connection from a Nokia to a laptop and in later times to a PDA using WAP.

As we moved into the social media era so did our forums users. Geocaching Ireland moved there too, and we have a thriving community on the Geocaching Ireland Discussion Group on Facebook. As a result, forum activity isn't what it used to be and I have taken the decision to disable new registrations to the forums and to make the forums read only so any information there can still be accessed.

I was looking to set-up a PQ for the USA for caches published in 2000. USA isn't included in the Country List (within the section labelled "Within"). However, US States are included in the list of States / Provinces.

You can select multiple states by using control-left-click. I set up a PQ to select all fifty states and the District of Columbia for the year 2000; the result has 92 caches. (I would send you the resulting GPX file but I was once told in no uncertain terms that doing so is a violation of Groundspeak's terms of service.)

It's interesting to look at the HTML source for the pocket query page, extract the list of countries, and sort by ID number. This gives an idea of when the countries were added and what's missing.

The first nine countries are Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Sweden, and United Kingdom. These start at ID #3. I speculate that "United States" was once ID #2 and has since been removed. (Perhaps because the database can't handle a query over such a large dataset?)

The next batch of countries runs alphabetically from Afghanistan (#12) to Vietnam (#215). After that comes a hodgepodge of countries, apparently added a few at a time. The most recent are Palestine, Saba, and South Sudan at #278.

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